So, Max was going to EBay‘s site this morning, and it didn’t come up. He asked me to try. It didn’t work. I did a traceroute, and it pretty much spun out after it got past ebay-2-gw.customer.alter.net. The next machine identified itself as “10.1.2.3”. That didn’t look right. So I did a whois on ARIN‘s site. That IP was registered to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, presumably making it an unused IP. In any case, it wasn’t EBay’s. So I did a little pinging, and Max did an address scan of EBay’s actual IP range. Of a couple hundred machines, only half-a-dozen replied. (A few gateways, a switch, and one, lonely, machine.) So I e-mailed tips@wired.com and Adam Penenberg. The phone rang a few minutes later.
Max: Hello? [pause] Um…yeah. Just a minute. [covers mouthpiece] Waldo, it’s James from Wired.
Waldo: Hello? James Glave? Wow. Yeah, sure, I’d be happy to.
So I talked to him, not knowing whether I was being interviewed, or if he was just looking for help on the story. Either way seemed cool. Well, he asked how to spell my name, and I knew that we were in.
Shortly thereafter, at 12:25pm, the story appeared on Wired. Woo!
And that’s pretty much all there is to it.